Mobile Security

How Secure Is Your iPhone?

I’ve become less stressed about online security recently. Not due to any increased protection measures on my part; I’ve been coasting on the same free antivirus software and rotation of passwords since the early ‘00s (except at work, where the IT team forces me to invent new and difficult-to-remember passwords every month). My reassurance has come from the evolution of the digital world into a shinier, more secure place. I used to worry about losing my hard drive, but now all those music and picture files are tucked safely away into the cloud. I used to worry about getting hacked, but now I spend most of my time on Apple mobile platforms — and the hackers like Apple people, right?

Then I read Mat Honan’s account of watching helplessly as his Amazon, Gmail, Twitter, iPhone, iPad, and MacBook were all hacked and wiped clean in less than an hour, and suddenly felt a lot less secure. If a Wired editor can get his digital possessions ransacked, what hope is there for the rest of us? Have all the leaps in personal computing we’ve enjoyed over the past few years left men more vulnerable online than we’ve ever been before?

I had the opportunity to have my emerging anxieties assuaged (or reinforced, depending on how you look at it) when AskMen was hosted at the annual Kaspersky Lab Security Summit in Moscow. Kaspersky Lab is the security company that discovered the government-engineered Stuxnet and Flame viruses. Their bread and butter, however, is protecting consumer computers like yours and mine from malware, hacking, and other digital devastations.

I talked with Chief Marketing Officer Alexander Erofeev, Senior Malware Analyst Denis Maslennikov and Chief Product Officer Petr Merkulov about new threats in the tablet/cloud era. Here are excerpts from those separate interviews, organized around the different places where the evil hackers are coming to get you: on Android, on Apple, in the cloud, and in wireless zones and torrents.

Security on Android

AskMen:Tell us about a danger in the digital world that didn’t exist two years ago.

Alexander Erofeev: There are many things changing, but growing fastest are security issues on mobile devices. Primarily on Android devices; we have statistics that show that two years ago we had identified 10 to 15 different types of malware for Android devices, which is actually a very low rate. In the first quarter of this 2012, that rate had increased about 20,000 per month.

Two years ago, for a number of reasons, Android devices were relatively safe. Today they are probably as dangerous as traditional PCs. In fact, relative to Android, the PC world is conservative. You can download many things to your PC, like freemium versions of software, and in many cases if you are not voluntarily leaving information then nothing will happen. But on Android if you download a free application you are expected to share data. [Furthermore], on mobile your data is embedded, right? So you are always sharing data. This is problem no. 1.

Problem no. 2 is that people have a very easygoing approach toward their mobile devices. These devices are new, and nice, and cute, so they look very safe. They are not like old, ugly computers, so people feel like they should be better protected. But the reality is they are not.

Denis Maslennikov: Vulnerabilities exist in both iOS and Android. But the fact is that cybercriminals target the most popular devices, and Android now has approximately 50% of the market — in terms of number of devices which use this operating system. For cybercriminals, Android is like Windows on desktops. They won’t pay a lot of attention to iOS, to Blackberry, to Windows Phone 7, or other operating systems that own a small percentage of the market... That’s why we hear a lot about the growing number of malware for Android.